Carbon is crazy stuff. One of the most common elements in the universe, the basis of all life on Earth, the foundation of organic chemistry, and part of one of the most common atmospheric gases—carbon dioxide, which imperils the planet via its role as a greenhouse gas. A major part of carbon’s ubiquity is its ability to form stable polymers such as carbon fibre. Like its parent element, carbon fibre is also mad stuff. Carbon fibre is five times stronger than steel and twice as stiff. Carbon fibres can be extruded thinner than human hair and woven into mats, which can be glassed with resins to create light, stiff, waterproof structures resistant to chemical attack. These properties make it ideal for manufacturing surfboards. Carbon fibres have been used to make boards for decades, but it has undergone a renaissance recently as a high-end material being used at the elite level, including for current world champ Filipe Toledo, which we’ll get to in a moment.
Carbon fibre was first extruded in the late 1800s by a couple of scientists, including Thomas Edison, who invented the lightbulb but almost immediately went underground as tungsten and other materials proved more practical. It wasn’t until the post-war period that scientists and materials engineers began messing around and creating purer and stronger forms of carbon fibre.
You’ve probably not heard of the Union Carbide Parma Technical Center in Cleveland or Dr Akio Shindo of the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology in Japan. It seems a
